The present disclosure relates generally to information handling systems, and more particularly to a system of integrated teaming to provide highest level common functionality supported by team members and system hardware for an information handling system.
As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option is an information handling system (IHS). An IHS generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements may vary between different applications, IHSs may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in IHSs allow for IHSs to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, IHSs may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
With regard to IHSs, teaming allows an IHS in a group of IHSs to take advantage of multiple network interface cards (NICs) or local area network (LAN) on motherboard (LOM) in a system by grouping the NICs or LOMs together in a team for load balancing, fault tolerance, and link aggregation.
Typically, teaming is provided through a software intermediate driver. Teaming uses the intermediate driver to group physical adapters into a team that acts as a single virtual adapter. The intermediate driver serves as a wrapper around one or more base drivers, thereby providing an interface between the base driver and a network protocol stack.
A problem with teaming, especially multi-vendor teaming, is that the team (e.g., a virtual adapter) will only have the lowest common level of functionality supported by all the team members. For example, there may be a situation where a user is trying to form a four member team and three members support a jumbo frame or any other advanced networking features, but one member doesn't support this particular feature. In such a situation, the team formed by these four members will not support the jumbo frame or other advanced networking features that one or more team members do not support. In addition, a member may support an advanced networking feature, but the feature is not enabled for that member. In other words, the virtual adapter formed to represent the team can only support enabled features supported by all team members. The reason for this is that if the team takes up a task which is not supported on one of the team members, then that team member will not be able to accomplish the task during load balancing or fail over operation.
Features like transfer control protocol (TCP) Offload Engine (TOE), receive side scaling (RSS), internet small computer system interface (iSCSI) offload, TCP/internet protocol (IP) checksum offload, and NIC hardware assisted features are not generally supported or enabled by all vendors and on all the available NICs. Therefore, it is common for a team formed by these NICs and LOMs to be running with a set of much reduced features. This may occur when one or more features are either not available or not enabled on certain adapters for some of the team members. As a result, this could cause information/task sharing performance degradation, limit users from using advanced network features, and cause a user to pay for NIC/LOM hardware and software functionalities that they are unable to use.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide an improved system of integrated teaming absent the disadvantages discussed above.